Coheed & Cambria
Year of the Black Rainbow
Like I said, I hit the vendors right after PT finished. Grabbed The Incident and Anesthetize—the Holland performance of Fear of a Blank Planet—and went wandering around to check out the venue and look for places to sit. You might ask "why on earth didn't you look at the place before the concert started?", and the answer is I already told you the answer. So ha ha ha.
Anyway, nice place, from what I could see. It's basically all floor area, along with a few tables on the left back side for casual observers, and a lounge (the 1894 Lounge) in the back, which I didn't explore. There's an upstairs section overlooking the right-hand bar, but I didn't explore that, either. Wasn't sure if I'd be allowed up there in the first place, and for once I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous. Probably had something to do with having been awake for almost twenty hours with only a three-hour nap separating me from the previous day.
I wandered around a fair bit looking for a place to sit, but all of the tables were either surrounded by people or occupied by alcoholic litter, and there were precious few places to plop against a wall. My plan had been to listen to Coheed & Cambria before watching them, but as it turned out I ended up standing off to the left rear, near the sound pit, at the beginning of their concert.
They definitely put on a killer show.
Now, I only watched the first two songs because after that I absolutely had to sit down somewhere, but they were pretty much the entertainment opposite of PT without crossing over into the realm of crazy for Crazy's sake. Coheed came to rock and have fun, and that's exactly what they did.
And they're good at it. I'll mention a bit later some of the things I didn't really care for, but I will not ever call them a bad band because each and every one of those boys can play. They play excellently with each other, they sound great, and it's obvious they've worked very hard at their instruments to get where they are now. I was impressed by that.
Coheed's musical style is . . . I think the best way to describe it is to say it's musical elation. The songs they write inspire you to get on your feet and make you feel victorious, and it's not too hard to find yourself singing along with them. Even now, the chorus of "In Keeping Secrets of the Silent Earth: 3" (from the album of the same name) is still running through my head at odd intervals. I think a few critics have said that C&C successfully fused progressive rock with pop-punk, and after hearing them I can certainly agree with the assessment.
The biggest problem with that is that a lot of their material sounds very similar. After the second song, I went and found a spot against the wall between the right-side bar and the restrooms (very clever locating, that) and just sat and listened, and things started to run together after a while—and not just because I was a little tired. They use a lot of very similar guitar riffs for their verse/chorus work, and they maintain a pretty constant level of Loud. Added to that, a good portion of Claudio Sanchez's vocals sit around the same part of his register, and that bothered me a great deal.
See, a huge part about music you love is that if someone hummed a quick strain of it you'd recognise it immediately and could respond right back. I could whistle the first four words of "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" and everyone would immediately go "how I wonder what you are". Same thing goes for the Barney theme song (which, I just realised, is the same melody as "This Old Man [he played One]"). But if you start to sing stuff like that all day, someone is going to try and kill you after about three hours of it because it just gets old. It's the same reason why a lot of people don't like jazz: their only concept of it is that you play a lot of notes really fast all over the place and none of it makes any sense.
Same thing with Coheed. Looking at one song at a time, they're really good, and I could definitely get into listening to them. But I couldn't listen to them for any long stretch of time because each song sounds almost just like the one previous. And I know fans of C&C would immediately jump down my throat and tell me how easy it is to recognise any of their songs from any others, and would jump at the chance to start listing obvious differences, but those differences would be in nuances and very small stylistic variations that the casual observer wouldn't immediately notice, whereas I would bet hard money you could take a random person off the street and play them similar excerpts from a couple of Rush or Blue Öyster Cult charts and the person would immediately know the differences, even if they didn't know how to communicate what those differences were. And if they only way you can tell songs apart is by the individual words, to me that's like being able to tell the difference between woodwind concertos of Mozart and Haydn: if you've listened to such stuff for hours and hours you'll be able to, and if you've never listened to them before you won't. And that's a big turn-off for me.
Anyway, I was sitting cross-legged over against the wall, observing people who went by and remarking to myself on the absurdity of some of the heels I saw, or bent over with my head down (my spine was complaining at having been straight for so long) and just listening to Coheed play. At some point I started to drift a little, in some part because of how the music was running together in my head.
I should note here that I really detest the phrase "criss-cross applesauce" not only because it makes utterly no sense (really, what on earth does applesauce have to do with sitting down?), but also because it's such a stupid 'resolution' to the whole politically-incorrect "Indian-style" which always made so much sense to me because Native Americans FREAKING SAT ON THE GROUND THAT WAY. I fail to see how it's possibly offensive to anyone. Slash rant.
Then there was a moment when I realised that something was pressed up against my left leg, and exactly at this moment someone (loudly, so as to be heard over the din) asked me something. I looked up, and it turned out that there was a leg against my leg, there was a fairly attractive girl attached to said leg, and said girl was the said addresser.
Long story short: I totally picked up a chick completely by accident.
She was a little drunk, of course. I mean, it was a little obvious, what with the slightly exaggerated movements and being told things like "this music makes my boobs hurt"—and of course her telling me how many drinks she'd had was a bit of a smallish clue, there. But that was a very amusing half hour. Towards the end there was also a small, slightly (probably) flirtatious (on her part) scuffle over my backpack—at one point I was caught off-balance and reeled into her with a surprised squawk, and I had to shrug my non-comprehension T a person who glanced over at me—because she wanted to run by the bar again and then head up to the front of the crowd, and I wanted to stay sitting down because it felt very good to be sitting down at that point in time. She finally informed me that she would go get one herself, and if she managed to get a free one then I would be coming back with her.
Apparently she did not. Not that I minded.
A little later Coheed finished up their set, and since I'd overheard someone else saying they'd previously posted their entire show order including their encores, I stood up to go watch. In the process I noticed someone had decided to be Green Man, but they were pretty awful. They only knew two dance moves, and the second one was basically the first one done with the hands pointing down instead of up.
Afterwards I hung out a bit while we waited for my friend's girlfriend to sort out her purchasing whims ( =/ ), and then drove back to the hotel stop. We went to get some food, but Taco Bell was out of ones, and we only had five ones between us so that wasn't going to work real well. Ended up the girlfriend got a Crunchwrap Supreme, which she declared wasn't tasty and delicious (per my friend's happy query) because it wasn't folded right.
He and I ate at Wendy's.
Next morning we woke up, managed to roll the girlfriend out of bed, amid bountiful protestations on her part, and then drove home. Hooray end of the story. =P
But all in all, it was a fantastic concert, and I'm very glad I got to go.
